Caspar David Friedrich and Me

Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818),  Caspar David Friedrich

Here's a story:

Once upon a time, I was in college.  And I loved college.  I loved it so much.  I loved everything about college.  Especially thinking.  I loved that it was my job to think, to listen to what others thought, and then to think about that, and afterwards, just walk around and think some more.

And, during this time, I fell in love with Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Deeply.   Every night I would grab my book of Emerson essays -- "Nature" "Self-Reliance" "The American Scholar" "The Poet" -- and just walk and walk and walk while reading and reading and reading.

On the cover of that book was this painting -- Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog -- which perfectly captured the Romantic, Transcendental philosophy I was so in love with.  It was a philosophy about finding Truth (capital T) in nature and about being True (capital T) to yourself.  About figuring out who you really were and bravely choosing to be it, even if everyone around you thought you were crazy or wrong.  About learning to be alone and about learning to question the crowd.

I loved Transcendentalism.  I still do.  And I loved that painting.

And I went into a PhD program vowing to write a dissertation about how much I loved Transcendentalism and that painting.

***

Six years later, I've unexpectedly found myself living one hour away from a small city named Greifswald where there is a statue of the artist Caspar David Friedrich.  He was born there and he painted there.  When Paul's family was visiting us, we visited the chalk cliffs on the nearby island of Ruegen, which was the setting for many of his early works.

Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen (1818), Caspar David Friedrich

A couple months later, I found myself in Dresden, where Caspar David Friedrich had moved to later in life to paint.  And, just a few miles outside of the city, we visited a national park, known for its strange stone formations.   We drove up a mountain and set off on a hike, at one point looking out across a valley of stone pillars and I realized where I was.  I was standing where the wanderer stood in that painting.  

I had become the wanderer above the sea of fog--the symbol chosen by historians to represent the philosophy I loved.

***

There has never been a day when I've regretted leaving my PhD program.  I knew when I was leaving that it wasn't the experience I had been looking for or needed.  I didn't love the Emerson or Transcendentalists of my advisers in Boston because they taught them as played-out, boring, old, irrelevant white men as opposed to the hip, new trends in the field like transnationalism (which, hey, is interesting, but not my thing).  Well, they may have been old white men, but dag nabbit, they were my old white men and I loved them!

So, with that in mind, I'm so grateful I randomly ended up where Caspar David Friedrich was born and painted his Romantic worldview because it's reminded me, after I thought that all the spark and joy I got out of Transcendentalism had been crushed by cynical English professors, that I still love thinking like that wanderer above the sea of fog.  I still love reading Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman and Peabody and Hawthorne.  I still love thinking.

So thank you, Caspar David Friedrich, for your paintings.  And thank you, Mecklenburg-Pomerania and Saxony, for inspiring him and me.

Woman Before the Rising Sun (1820) Caspar David Friedrich